Impact

Work Area Description

There are no united systematic methodological guidelines and empirical analyses of third sector impact in Europe. TSI is going to change this.

TSI aims to assess existing approaches to measure the multiple impacts of the third sector and volunteering.

It works towards finding consensus within the research community and among third-sector leaders on the most promising approaches to third sector impact assessment.

TSI will recommend new and unified impact indicators to statistical bodies in Europe.

Objectives and Goals

TSI focusses on impacts of third sector activity on:

the economy in terms of employment, worker integration, and urban regeneration;

social capital and trust;

civic engagement;

innovation;

sense of well-being among European citizens.

This task will be carried out in three steps:

Cross-national surveys or combinations of national surveys allow analysis of individual effects of volunteering, employment and participation in third sector organizations for various types of socio-economic impacts in European countries.

Differences in impact will be explained through macro-level comparisons across countries and categories of third sector organizations.

Long-term development trends will be analysed with the help of surveys of local associations with time-series data from some of the partner countries, i.e. to uncover shifts between organization categories, characteristics of the surviving organizations etc.

Goal is the development of measures for the most significant potential impact variation between European countries and regions.

Karl Henrik Sivesind holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Oslo and has been working as Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo since 2000, since 2004 on professor-level.
He serves on the Board of Directors of ISTR (International Society for Third Sector Research). He was Editor in Chief of the leading Norwegian multidisciplinary Journal of Social Science Research for 6 years. He has been involved in several comparative, social scientific research projects. He was the coordinator of the FP6 network CINEFOGO in Norway, and member of the steering committee for the "European Voluntary Associations" network. His research interests include civil society and the voluntary sector, nonprofit welfare services, comparative methods.
Karl Henrik is lead researcher for Third Sector Impact work area 2 (elaboration and testing of impact indicators). He serves as executive board member together with Annette Zimmer (MU), Lester Salamon (JUH) and Bernard Enjolras (ISF).

Sivesind, K. H., Pospíšilová, T., & Frič, P. (2013) Does Volunteering Cause Trust? A comparison of the Czech Republic and Norway. European Societies: The Official Journal of the European Sociological Association, 15(1), 106-130.

Projects

Outsourcing of Scandinavian welfare societies? Consequences of private and nonprofit service provision (2012-2016)
This project is designed to improve our understanding of how welfare politics; allocation of service contracts to public, private and nonprofit providers; and citizen roles are linked, by addressing the following research questions:
• Under what circumstances are active citizenship roles as opposed to narrower consumerist roles likely to occur?
• Does it make a difference if the providers belong to the public, private or the nonprofit sector?
• Are there differences between welfare services where there is broad party consensus about the need to curb costs, as opposed to services where there is competition about improvement and expansion between the parties?
• Do the institutional logics by which welfare service contracts are allocated to providers and expectations coordinated matter, i.e. is there a shift from government to governance?
The project will strengthen stakeholders' critical awareness of consequences of outsourcing and user choice for active citizenship. The project involves researchers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark and provides a comparative perspective on the Scandinavian welfare societies.
See more at: http://www.socialresearch.no/Projects/Ongoing-projects/Outsourcing-of-Scandinavian-welfare-societies
Role: Project Manager
Organisational community in transition (2014 -2015)
The issues to be addressed in this project are what changes take place in the Norwegian organisational population and in the organisational structure at the local, regional and national levels, which social spheres the organisations primarily direct themselves toward, and their scope with regard to membership, staff and finances, as well as contact with public authorities.
This project is a part of the Centre for Research on Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector, which is a partnership between the Institute for Social Research and the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies/The University of Bergen.
See more at: http://www.civilsociety.no/
Role: Project Manager
Funding and framework conditions (2016-2017)
The question to be answered in this project is how small, medium and large organisations in various categories are affected by changes in sources of income and framework conditions. Considerable and rapid changes in the sources of income of voluntary organisations in Norway are taking place. It may be sufficient to mention the disappearance of gambling machine income, the introduction of a temporary compensation scheme, the introduction of compensation for service tax, expansion to compensation for all types of VAT and a gradual escalation toward full VAT compensation, changes in the lottery scheme, national lotteries that are outcompeted by Norwegian Tipping, increased income from gifts and sponsorships in several categories of organisations. In many instances, such changes may affect different organisations such that they reinforce each other or weaken each other. Also, in many cases, such changes have incentive effects that result in the organisations adapting in a more or less desirable direction.
The project will analyze how changes in framework conditions and sources of incomes interact and affect organisations of different sizes in different organisational categories. The project is part of the Centre for Research on Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector, which is a partnership between the Institute for Social Research and the Stein Rokkan Centre for Social Studies/The University of Bergen.
See more at: http://www.civilsociety.no/
Role: Project Manager

Get in touch with us

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Great news from TSI: the UN Statistics Division will issue a new guidance manual for Satellite Accounts on Nonprofit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work that embodies TSI's conceptualization of the third sector
#thirdsector #measurement

July 12, 2017 10:54 am

People's #trust in the UK charity sector seems to be alive and kicking, despite political campaings
#thirdsector #impact

July 5, 2017 9:17 am

Third Sector Impact added a new photo.

July 5, 2017 9:16 am

And we even have a panel at #6EMESconf, with Bernard Enjolras, Taco Brandsen, Francesca Petrella and Benedikt Pahl

July 5, 2017 7:43 am

TSI's Rafael Chaves is sharing his and Teresa Savall's analysis of the gaps between national and EU policy discourse to support third sector and social economy and the reality in Spain
#6EMESconf

July 5, 2017 7:07 am

Sharing results of the TSI project at 6th EMES European Research Network conference in Louvain-la-Neuve. Currently Ulla Pape on the changing policy environment for #TSOs

June 27, 2017 3:07 pm

Also coming up: Tenth Asia Pacific Regional Conference of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR)

Fellow FP7 project Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation produced a new paper on the politics of social innovation that formulates policy recommendations how to best support social innovation in various contexts.
#socinn #replicationhttp://mailchi.mp/8487250eab3e/cressi-news-15?e=b9f90a9ce7